[jefffoster]

I agree this is an important metric and a kind of technical debt that's hard to capture.

How do you discriminate this from RenovateBot or Dependa-Bot? Both of those will not only track the drift but they'll also generate the PR to fix it.

[colinbartlett]

Co-author here, thanks for the input. We use Dependabot on all our projects and love it. I've not seen any kind of numeric metric in Dependabot or any of their competitors.

What I really want is a graph that shows, numerically, the drift over time. You can show this to your stakeholders: "See, look! We haven't dedicated time to stack upgrades and now look how far out of date we are creeping." And then, consequently, I want to see that chart burn down to zero as you do stay on top of things with the help of Dependabot or similar.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

This is the libyears metric ( https://libyear.com/ ) tracked over time.

Or are you using a different metric that you haven't defined for us?

[k__]

As a freelancer, this sounds really interesting to me. It's always hard to sell people maintenance.